Prisoner
by DarkestAngellic
Summary: In his own mind there is no escape. The last place of retreat for everyone else is nothing more than a cage, and Vincent? He is the prisoner. Forever doomed to the torment within his own mind. A hell he cannot escape.


_**Disclaimer: I own nothing from FFVII, not the settings, not the characters, not the names. Nothing. I own absolutely nothing. It is all the property of the wonderful Square Enix.**_

* * *

He awakens to a headache more similar to a Behemoth using his skull as a pillow or a stepping stone. He aches all over - dull throbs here as though his skin is mottled with technicolour bruising, sharp and stabbing pain there as though he'd just been split open and left to bleed until his veins and arteries run empty - and there's so much stiffness to his muscles that he can't even twitch a finger.

What... what happened...? Where was he? Why was he in that where he didn't know?

The minutes trickle by, each one bringing coherent thought on baby step closer to his grasp until, finally, after what feels like an eternity, memory comes forward through the fog cloaking his mind in numb confusion. The argument comes back to him first, that same anger as before flooding fast through his veins and were it not for the inability to move just yet, his hands would have curled into tight fists. Then comes the memory of white lab coat and red shoes, honey-hued hair and chocolate irises... the memory of her moving to Hojo's side. Her. Lucrecia. Dearest Lucrecia... at Hojo's side. It burns with all the sharp potency of Ifrit's Hellfire, sends jagged shards of pain through him, so acute that he instinctively shies away from the image, the briefest flash of a wince visible on his otherwise emotionless face. He remembers... remembers... he... -!

Panic and confusion crash through him, bowl him over and knock him under, all but drowning him, stifling him, choking him. Gunshot. He remembered the gunshot. He remembered the agony of flesh and muscle being rent open, bone being nicked, blood pooling hot and sticky, spreading... He remembered the laughter... could vaguely recall a scream...

He'd _died_.

So then... how could he be alive? _Was_ he alive? Where was he? _What_ was he?

**_Nothing more than an experiment._**

The voice is not his. It is far deeper and huskier than his, rough and gravelly beyond what his vocal cords can produce. He doesn't know how he knows it, but part of him recognises that his ears have not heard the voice... he knows that it resonates within his mind... and is confused as to how such a thing can happen and how he's aware of it.

_**Congratulations - you're not as stupid as you look.**_

_... What are you?_

_**Very clever. What, not who. If it weren't for the fact that I have no body to speak of, you would have tickled my funny bone with firing out the correct question.**_

_... The same one you haven't answered._

_**I'm your worst nightmare, Valentine. And that's all you need to know.**_

He was insane. He had to be. He was hearing a voice in his head. That was not normal.

_**You're entire situation isn't normal, you blind fool. You died, and yet you live. That is as far from normal as you can possibly get.**_

_Then how am I alive?!_

_**... You live because of me. The bitch forced our fusion so that my vitality might reanimate your body.**_

_... You mean -?_

_**The whore from your memories. Yes, her.**_

_Don't speak of her in such a manner!_ As confused as he is, already in pain from both memory and physical body alike, common sense is gone. Long gone. Perhaps, if it had stayed, he would have recognised the dark tone of the unknown voice. Perhaps he would have held his... mental tongue. But defending the woman he loves is instinctual and habit, having argued with many an employee of Shin-Ra over her usefulness to the company and the brilliance of her mind.

... It is instinct and habit not appreciated by the thing sharing his head, if the sudden wave of blistering fury is anything to go by.

_**You dare defend that little parasite to me?! You dare speak for her when she's done nothing but use you and toss you aside once her interest waned?! She left, you fool. Her life brought about your end, her stupidity forced you into a second existence, her cowardice resulted in her fleeing with her tail between her legs!**_

_What - she wouldn't - where is she?_

_**Gone! Run away like the little coward she is. You were nothing more than a fanciful little change in her mundane routine with the maggot scientist she called a husband. Nothing more than a quick fuck, and then the means to an end.**_

_The means to what end?_

_**Through the fusion she has forced between us, she grew closer to proving her thesis on the Chaos gene as being truth and fact, not legend and myth.**_

_"Grew closer?"_

_**I told you already. She's gone. Fled. Scurried away to hide from the big bad Hojo who wouldn't let her see her son, not even once.**_

_Then..._

_**Don't paint her in an innocent light, you stupid boy! The babe all but screams day in and day out under Hojo's care. She'd condemned the innocent child to certain death.**_

_You lie! She loves her child! She wouldn't -_

_**She abandoned him to**_Hojo_**. She's run away. Left. Abandoned her son and abandoned you. Left us all to be the playthings of the monster she married. The woman you know is nothing but a fake image, a pretence, a mask. Horrible little lying bitch. Twisted little parasite. Just as deluded as the alien abomination.**_

* * *

The thing in his head, the demon... Chaos... _the_ Chaos... was merciless in his attempts to make his fury at their joining clear to Vincent. Day in and day out his bloodied, torn body would be dumped into the mako tank after another round of gruelling experiments. Countless hours spent under scalpel and chemical alike, his body slowly but surely molding to Hojo's whims until he was more a walking corpse than a human being, heart eventually falling silent. He knew then that, should the demon be removed from every cell in his form, his body would crumple like a broken puppet, wither like a dying flower and dissolve into the Lifestream in only a matter of minutes. Without Chaos, he was a dead man.

And yet with the demon present within him... he still felt much the same. Day in and day out his physical torment at Hojo's hands would end, only for the mental torture to begin, a barrage of images and memories and regrets picked apart and split open, examined and scrutinised, comments here and criticism there. Closing in around him, choking him, stifling him, until he's screaming in his head and lashing out with all the panicked determination of an injured animal trying desperately to flee from its soon-to-be killer. And in the expanse of his mind... Chaos never stops. Never naps, never sleeps... endless torment.

Their mental clashing eventually pulls others from the very fabric of their beings, smashed together into one body and forced to coexist, it was only natural that _something_ would be created from such a merge. Death Gigas came first, playing dumb spectator to the feuds between demonic WEAPON and host, sometimes aiding Vincent, others aiding Chaos, in the ever-shifting battle for control over the one body. Then came Hellmasker, throwing a spanner into the rusty works by hurling an extra zap of insanity into the mix until Vincent's head-space is more akin to a war zone. Nightmares plagued his subconscious mind with the formation of that particular lesser-demon, images of blood and death and snapped bones and bodies contorted into shapes unnatural. Images that he'd never seen before in his life, drawing screams from his sleeping throat. Finally came the canine-demon. Galian Beast. With him came the pecking order - the need for some form of pack stability. Chaos was Alpha, even though Vincent could somehow gain a limited control over him at times. He was far too strong to not be acknowledged as the most powerful of the five now forced together.

* * *

By the time three decades pass, Vincent Valentine's mind has altered into something unrecognisable, something completely different from his past. Rather than the cool, collected thought process of a Turk with a charge to guard and a duty to perform, his mind is structured very much like the Nibelheim mansion. Only larger within the mental planes. Filled with rooms, each door closed off to the memories they all contain, some dark, some light, others locked and the rest destroyed and razed to piles of ash. Galian Beast has his corridor, all the rooms where he basks focusing more on the sense memories from Vincent's past. The sights, sounds, smells, tastes... He enjoys them the most, is content to remain within that corridor and not move unless absolutely necessary. Death Gigas blunders around the entire ground floor, the battle zones, trudging from one memory into another and batting away the remembered foes like ragdolls, bellowing laughter showing his delight in the senseless attacks. There is no need for thinking there, no need to heed instinct, and that is where he is most comfortable. Where every reaction has a reaction. Cause and effect. The simplest rules and laws of living things and nature. Hellmasker takes the attic area. Fitting, in a sense, since that place is where the dark tendrils of nightmares and past mistakes cling like disease. Tainting and corroding everything nearby into a further mockery of Vincent's old life. From there his subconscious terrors stem, sweeping through the mansion of his head like a chill winter's stormy gales, blowing out all candles and extinguishing any source of light and warmth.

Vincent keeps to the basement, where he locks away the few good memories he has, the few faces he had come to consider as close-but-not-quite friends, the handful of smiles and happy moments. He chooses the basement as his place of retreat, his solace, the place to recover his sanity when up above is thrown into utter destruction, the very foundations of the mansion shuddering when the four demons squabble and war with each other.

And Chaos? He has free roam. He was the shadow in every corner, creeping along the floor and over the walls, up on the ceiling and through the cracks. There was no hiding from Chaos, there was no keeping secrets from him. The most powerful of them all, he could pry every little speck of information from Vincent and the others with but a flex of deadly mental talons. Took great delight in doing so, all but purring at the screams he managed to coax from each throat. He was the darkness that permeated Vincent's very being. He was the taint. He was the evil. He was the power.

... He was the source that kept Vincent alive.

In the place that was the sanctuary for every human being, the last place to flee... there was no hiding. There was no retreating, no fleeing, no escaping. For Chaos was nowhere and everywhere all at once, and he made sure the others knew it. Vincent Valentine, man with no heartbeat, was prisoner in his own twisted mind.


End file.
